The U.S. and Russia will decide the fate of Ukraine, and the end result will be to Russia’s liking or it will keep inflicting more death and destruction on Ukraine. From Simplicius at simplicius76.substack.com:
In this hefty ~3,500 word article we go into the current setup for negotiations between the two great powers. The exclusive paid section afterwards will deal primarily with predictions on how things will play out over the course of the next six months to a year, including how the conflict might settle.
Things are rolling full steam ahead on the ‘negotiations’ front. Russian and American counterparts are set to meet in Riyadh tomorrow, February 18th. The American team is said to consist of Rubio, Witkoff, and Mike Waltz, and the Russian one of Lavrov, Putin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov, and Kirill Dmitriev.
Ushakov was once famous in Russian media for allegedly having an assistant, one Oleg Smolenkov, who was accused of being a CIA informant after allegedly being ‘exfiltrated’ to the US. If true, this is obviously a concerning bit of information.
They are seen arriving to Riyadh, Ushakov just behind Lavrov:
Edit: the negotiations have now commenced:
